Paro the Seal

Toronto Star, 2015

I watch the news reporter on the Youtube video announce “A pair of robotic furry seals help elderly victims now in a retirement home recover from their mental scars, after Japan's March quake and tsunami disaster.” The next shot takes me into a retirement room with long tables; elderly people sit around the tables, with their Paro seals on the table or being clutched on their laps. They are hugging their furry pet adoringly, crooning their chins closer to the nose of the furry soft cute companion. It seems both ridiculous and sad.

NTD.TV, 2011

“For some elderly survivors of Japan's March earthquake and tsunami, comfort comes in the form of a small white robotic seal named Paro.” I can’t help but wonder if this illusion is ethical.

NTD.TV, 2011

An 85-year-old female resident, Satsuko Yatsuzaka, says, whilst petting her Paro seal on her knee. "If I hold onto this, it doesn't matter if there's a typhoon outside, I still feel like I'm safe.” They sit and cuddle, smile.

NTD.TV, 2011

The reporters voice states; “This Suisyoen retirement home is located in the middle of Japan's triple crises, the residents - many of them still dealing with memories of the March quake - treat the new furry friends as pets.” Resident of the home Ayako Shizo describes, "It's just as cute as a little living creature and so everyone is looking after it every day. It does sometimes run out of battery power and stop. But when it's got its eyes open everyone stands around talking to it, asking it how it's doing and things like that.” She strokes the robotic seal’s face as she talks. Suisyoen's General Manager says using robots makes therapy easier in some situations.

He says "First of all it's necessary to look after the live animals when keeping them for animal therapy. That however is rather difficult in certain situations and so in these cases, we use a doll, albeit a robotic one, as an alternative method to help people recover." As the robots only hold an hour-and-a-half of battery-life, the residents normally hug their pets in the morning and charge them over lunch, so their furry friends are full of life again in the afternoon. Like all ethical issues it is not clearcut though. Dealing with trauma, using an augmented reality is certainly not a new technique, and virtual reality is used for soldiers allocated to military action to prepare for and recover from trauma, as Harun Farocki so precisely demonstrated in his video work Serious Games III: Immersion (2010) about American soldiers during the Iraqi war. If these robotic pets provide real comfort, is the synthetic nature of the companionship immoral? It represents an Otherness, yet is also a comforting familiarity. It is replacing a real comfort, a genuine comfort and a familiarity, with a synthetic ease minus commitment - the heart is the battery, which can be switched off, it will run out. Mess free companionship. “"It's just as cute as a little living creature and so everyone is looking after it every day. It does sometimes runs out of battery power and stop.” Similarly, I am reminded of children’s use of soft toys, (these days this also can be somewhat robotic with new toy technology) which acts as a parent proxy, or a friend proxy – a proxy that makes them feel better. What then, is a proxy for? It is an authority to represent “someone else”, an agent that can substitute for another person (or otherwise) or authorise an agent to act. When the toy responds it ceases to be the same kind of thing, of a robotic Otherness. It is a proxy for companionship, a furry cute body. Its representation as a cute animal, is also non-threatening, if it were for instance a cyborg in human form, or a robot with visible metal mechanisms, it perhaps would not have the comforting effect on vulnerability. In fact it is unlikely that one would want a real seal on their lap to cuddle, so the likeness to a real animal is in fact a mirage, a kind of hyper-reality, a live cartoon if you will. Yet its actual mechanics are much the same, just masked with cute fur and what appears as algorithms that display affection interacting with a human. We of course do not find all animals cute and companionable, we fear them too, as well as eating them. This appears to be more about the touch that affects the psychology of the human in a therapy. The Paro seal augments an impoverished social reality, but with something that is unreal yet real, a juxtapose - still a kind of human and animal relationship (in the eyes of a human). It is perhaps an automation of interaction, a posthumous interaction. As Rosi Braidotti explained it is a “dialectical scheme of opposition”.i Deleuze and Guatarri’s theory on becoming-animal acts as a description of two entities becoming each other - I particularly resonate in this instance with their choice of Remy Chauvin’s quote in A Thousand Platueus: "the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”ii They also argue that “collective assemblages of enunciation function directly with mechanic assemblages”, and there is no disguising between signs and objects - in this instance I will perceive the Paro as an object and the interaction as a sign. Deleuze and Guatarri further describe this as “particular modes of assemblage and types of social power”iii - again this brings me to the ethics and power constructs with

this particular social interaction used for the support of trauma. Rosi Braidotti explained “the posthuman in the sense of post-athropecetrism displaces the dialectical scheme of opposition, replacing well-established dualisms with the recognition of deep zoe-egalitarianism between humans and animals. The vitality of their bond is based on sharing this planet, territory or environment in terms that are no longer so clearly hierarchical, nor self-evident. This vital interconnection posits a qualitative shift of the relationship away from speciesism and towards an ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, other) can do.”iv Braidotti further describes pets in general, home pets – that qualify as cyborgs, in the sense they are mixtures of posthuman relationality, a compound of nature-culture continuum. She discusses clones of animals, and specifically the first clone of an animal, Dolly the sheep, as an ideal form of intimacy representing a post-anthropocentric human-animal interaction. Of course the Paro is not a breathing entity of an organism, however it is a machine, and certainly a mechanical clone, a genderless mechanical clone. The Paro is also a device, a proxy device of a sort, a proxy for human-animal-machine-cyborg-algorithmic-interaction. It is a proxy for the imagination; proxy for empathy; and a proxy for an actual animal. I will presume then that real animals are not used for health and safety reasons. Can, these traumatised people no longer communicate without the aid of such a mechanical object? That is probably not so as I can see demonstrated in these videos. Is it then simply that real animals are excluded as too messy and alive, a hazard? How far is this an experiment in therapeutic aid? Maybe we can question how far the human is willing to enter into the illusion, on whether the ethics of the situation can be questioned. Wizard of Oz, is used to describe remotely operating a robot where the user thinks it is for real, as is it the game’s control unit in war therapy virtual reality. Is this a reality that is ever left, even after it is switched off? Does Dorothy ever leave Kansas? In the story of Wizard of Oz, trauma is being excluded; the witch is killed; yet the wizard turns out to have no real powers and Dorothy always did have the capacity to return to Kansas. The elderly in the retirement home perhaps live in a hybrid of Oz from which the witch is banished by a furry robot, an amalgam of all Dorothy’s companions, but minus even the limited goals and autonomy they possessed. The substance of how the reality is augmented or indeed whether it is augmented and not degraded. Is it however the substance, if an emotional sustenance, or merely a simulating illustration. The borders of reality and fiction slip further together. Eleanor Jones June 2017 iThePosthuman–Chapter:ThePosthumanasBecoming-animal-RosiBraidotti2013iiAThousandPlateaus:CapitalismandSchizophrenia–pg11–GillesDeleuzeandFélixGuattari1972iiiAThousandPlateaus:CapitalismandSchizophrenia–pg8–GillesDeleuzeandFélixGuattari1972ivThePosthuman–Chapter:ThePosthumanasBecoming-animal-RosiBraidotti2013